A watch is just for telling the time - your other gadgets are for everything else.

That being the case, there are few things as geekishly awesome as an automatic (ie self-winding) mechanical wristwatch.

A little tiny machine, small enough to wear on your arm, that uses nothing but springs and harmonic motion to keep time, accurate to within a couple of seconds per day.

If you have the means, you can spend $_absurd on a status-symbol automatic watch.
If you don't have those means (or that inclination), you can get some serious bargains.

My everyday watch is a Vostok. http://www.vostok-inc.com/ . Delivered from Moscow for under $100. Seemingly indestructible, and more than accurate enough - I only ever need to adjust it if it stops, after not being worn for a couple of days.

I've seen some Seiko 5 automatics recently on Amazon for similar prices. More elegant (and delicate) looking than my Vostok (which is more like a watch movement set in an anvil), but very good little units.

Second-hand mechanical watches can be found for even less.

Get some cheap watchmaking tools off Ebay and pull a cheap mechanical watch to pieces, just for fun. Because you can.

The majority of the population live in the Metropoleis - the 5 big state capital cities in Australia house 13M of our 22M people (2009). Down here at city #19, population 90k or so, we're deeply in to the tail end of the bell curve.

But if you don't put any barriers in how shall they ever learn about proxies, address spoofing, packet sniffers and all the other wonderful things involved in defeating technical parental controls?

I'm in Australia, you insensitive clod!

My kids won't be defeating parental controls [1] - we'll all be defeating overbearing paternalistic government controls.
[1] although she's only 2.5, this thread has given some food for thought on how to deal with my daughter's computer useage when the time comes. Monitored freedom sounds like a sensible approach.

A good example of homeopathic remedy... is good old fashioned marijuana.

I am currently breathing a homeopathic concentration of marijuana smoke.

In fact, the air I'm breathing probably exceeds homeopathic concentrations of marijuna smoke, assuming somebody in this city has smoked a joint some time in the last few days.

Comparing the effect of this "homeopathic remedy" concentration of marijuana (aka "air") against previous experiments using "naturopathic remedy" concentration... I observe a correlation between concentration and effectiveness, contrary to the theory underlying homeopathy.

Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday January 14, 2010 @03:19PM
from the insert-overlaid-part-a-into-slot-b dept.

kkleiner writes "ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, is a head mounted display unit that provides graphic overlays to assist you in making repairs. An Android phone provides an interface to control the graphics you view during the process. Published in IEEE, and recently tested with the United States Marine Corps on an armored turret, ARMAR can cut maintenance times in half by guiding users to the damaged area and displaying 3D animations to demonstrate the appropriate tools and techniques."

the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.

That is funny, but if you've ever been around a dairy farm, it makes a lot of sense....
There's a huge amount of waste heat that could very easily be exploited for heating.

To me, that just goes to highlight the vast amount of low-grade heat that is available, effectively for free, and the absurdity of burning virgin fuel to produce low-grade heat suitable for house heating.

Warm air is a waste product of almost every process in the home (to say nothing of industry, or the warm air available free from a very crude solar-thermal collector), yet we choose to consume fuel to produce special warm air to heat our homes. Insanity.

How secure is your job, employer and industry? How transferable are your skills?

I'm 5 years your junior (in a different industry, on a different continent), and I made a considered jump out of tech a few years ago. I regret doing so.
I found myself in a specialised technical niche of a declining industry. I made a push to get into a project management role, where, if nothing else, I could get a few more generalist skills to write on a resume. Now I'm in a dull administrative role which I don't enjoy at all.

I've come to acknowledge that I get job satisfaction from solving problems. Now if I do my job properly, I don't see problems... and if I do, they're long-term problems that can't just be sat down and worked through. To run projects in a resource-constrained organisation, I need to be shameless in pushing people to do my work ahead of the other work they've been given... and that doesn't come easy to me.

The reasons for making the shift are still there - I could still be the tech guy with no transferable skills. Now I have some of the skills I would need to bluff my way into a comparable job elsewhere... but no interest in doing a comparable job elsewhere.

I don't have a good answer. Just don't burn any bridges unless you're pretty sure you're doing the right thing.

sas-dot writes: Is this nerdiness we know? New York Times carries this article on Who is a nerd?, excerpts from it "What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd; students have also "reported" themselves. Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, "hyperwhite."

An anonymous reader writes: For all the work Unix and Linux administrators do with authenticating users and synching their machines with Microsoft Windows boxes, a bit of laziness could do them well in the long run.

But when Jerry Carter, release manager for Samba 3.0, talks about laziness as he did during a session at the LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit, what he really meant is eliminate redundancy in Linux and Unix environments, specifically, when dealing with identity management and user authentication. In the Windows world, he said, much of the group policy work in the Linux IT guy's day is already done for him.